Sexism Hurts

Sexism can be simple and obvious (for example, the F.A. ban on the women’s game). More often, it’s subtle, complex, and really hard to tackle. Take, for example, the impact of poor medical understanding of women in general on women athletes in particular.

We see this in the alarming frequency with which women athletes who play soccer and basketball suffer ACL tears. The ACL tear is a very serious knee injury, requiring complex surgery and a lot of recovery time. (Pictured, right: Danielle Fotopolous, the USWNT player who retired in 2007 after tearing her ACL for the third time in 2006.)

The New York Times Sunday magazine recently published an in-depth story about young women soccer players, the injuries they sustain, and the difficulty we have in dealing with them. The article is adapted from Michael Sokolove’s forthcoming book Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women’s Sports. (Can I just say: I hate that title. It’s so paternalistic! And aimed at the parent-reader, not at the female athlete. How about – Match Fit: Injury Prevention for Young Women Athletes?)

This interesting article is unfortunately wrapped in a sensationalist package. Problematically, Sokolove makes news of the fact that more women are injured as more women play (really?!). The following rhetoric, for example, makes it seem like Title IX is the cause for the increase in 17 year olds needing knee surgery – and as if this were in itself the problem:

This casualty rate [JD: no statistic here, the author just means the number of injuries suffered by a couple of high school teams] was not due to some random spike in South Florida. It is part of a national trend in the wake of Title IX and the explosion of sports participation among girls and young women [No soccer teams = No ACL tears]. From travel teams [these are the club teams not based in the school system] up through some of the signature programs in women’s college sports, women are suffering injuries that take them off the field for weeks or seasons at a time, or sometimes forever. [Unlike men? I mean, of course women suffer career-ending injuries! At least they don't break each other's legs!]

The author then goes on the explain how girls develop differently – e.g. boys gain more muscle, but become less flexible; girls get fatter but more flexible. The author’s language flirts dangerously close to naturalizing girls and women as weaker, more delicate etc (I’m not the only one to spot this slant).

Towards the end of the article, the author interviews Holly Silver, a physical therapist who has developed a knee injury prevention program that should be adopted by all footballers and their trainers.

Silver touches on some possible reasons for the high rate of ACL tears in women athletes: Girls are taught to walk and stand and move through the world differently. We curl around our chests – our bodies become shells, in a way, protecting/hiding everything ‘feminine’ – those bits are sources of shame, abuse, negative attention. [Ed: Found this note on Kickster, about the reception of the first women's game in 1894: "The British Medical Journal offered its professional opinion that 'we can in no way sanction the reckless exposure to violence, of organs which the common experience of women had led them in every way to protect'."]

One of the beautiful things about playing football is it forces women to free their bodies from this shell: You can’t trap the ball with your chest if you are hiding it from the world. You can’t make a good play if your eyes are trained on your feet. You won’t have much touch or footwork if your hips are locked.

Pointing to a player with good form, Silver explains: ‘She moves like a boy….Believe me, that’s a good thing.’

In other words, that girl carries herself like an athlete. Girls are not encouraged to adopt this stance (knees bent, butt low to the ground). And so that posture has become synonymous with ‘boy’. Boys, of course, aren’t born moving this way – and lots of boys don’t carry themselves that way (and are therefore terrorized for ‘walking/throwing like a girl’). The point here is that the social inscription of gender is deep: it may be culturally produced, but it is carved into our spines, and worked into our joints. Girls need to unlearn that stuff – as athletes, they sometimes literally need to learn to walk, and run.

Silver describes the extraordinary consequence of the way that girls inhabit their bodies as they play sports – if you run with poor posture, your running is not only inefficient, it harms your back, hips: all your joints, in fact. As any yoga practitioner will tell you, holding tension in your joints not only makes you less flexible and responsive (slowing your reflexes), it makes you more prone to aches and pains.

My sister coaches girls cross-country and track at Voorhees High School in New Jersey. Her teams have been very successful. Injury prevention is a big part of her program. They work on building up their strength in the gym, on minimizing strain to their muscles, on overall health and well-being (by wilson santiago). For example, she has the girls keep an eye on their iron levels – anemia is a big problem for teenage girls and young women, and can have a big impact on your development as an athlete. She’s always looking for the latest information on issues like these, and keys these insights to the specifics of her sport and the people she coaches (teenage girls). Not all coaches approach their work this way.

One must recognize gender differences in order to coach/train/treat athletes well. Those differences may be physiological, metabolic, social and psychological.

For example, athletes in general are loathe to report injuries. Reporting injury or medical problems can be even harder for some girls and women. Here are some reasons why:

*We don’t want to seem weak. In a world that reads all physical signs of womanliness as symptoms of the weakness of your sex, getting an injury makes you feel like your body has betrayed you, again.

*Women athletes can be reluctant to own up to the differences gender makes, because admitting to those differences has meant admitting to belonging to the ‘weaker sex.’ Remember: every girl – even today – will be told at some point that girls can’t or shouldn’t play or compete. Every girl hears that girls are weak, that they aren’t tough. Or that playing a sport makes them mannish – i.e. repugnant. To all of this, players say: Screw That, and get on with it. So, not only do we not want to seem weak – sometimes we don’t want to seem like ‘girls’.

*Doctors treat us differently. They don’t listen to what we say about our bodies. They read everything through their ideas about our reproductive system. Our experiences with doctors tend to start off bad, and get worse. We have little reason to trust them.

*We are reluctant to talk about our bodies – sport is often the only avenue through which we get to talk about our bodies in a way that is neutral, matter-of-fact and empowering. I’ll never forget listening to my sisters talk about pre-race bowel-clearing nerves and the humiliating but often hilarious situations that puts you in. As much as their stories made me laugh, I didn’t really ‘get’ it until I started playing football and found myself at Hackney Marshes trying to act cool as we waited for the mens’ teams to clear out of the damn bathrooms. Never, ever, go to Hackney, ladies, without a roll. Somehow, I associate that kind of frank and humorous talk about the body with ‘jock’-culture. Some of us need encouragement to adopt this kind of attitude.

*Girls aren’t always used to thinking of their bodies as something they can control. Except by starving themselves.

Add onto the above the following:

*Many girls and women play team sports on bad fields/in poor facilities.

*98% of sports stores don’t carry football boots made for women – and that 2 % will carry maybe two kinds. The overwhelming majority of women wear men’s boots, in other words.

*Because women were prevented from playing for so long, coaching/training is modeled after the boys/mens game, and a lot of coaches are not aware of things like the frequency of ACL tears in young women footballers and the conditioning programs which might prevent those injuries.

*We accept the differences in the way that men and women move as ‘natural’, and so do nothing to raise girl athlete’s awareness of poor posture on the field, poor running technique, the importance of being relaxed and having a good stance.

*And, most problematic of all: we don’t listen to girls. We don’t take their complaints seriously. We dismiss their complaints as teenage melodrama or psychosomatic weakness.

That’s a lot of crap to deal with. It’s why teaching/coaching/advising girls and women can be harder – but it’s also why it’s so absolutely rewarding. The things we learn in such settings not only change how we play – they in fact change how we live.

This outstanding post is both informative and shocking. We need to see an organized effort to train coaches to adapt training methods to better serve young women. A big problem is that (here in the States, at least), nearly all youth club coaches are men who won’t want to touch this subject at the especially critical pre-teen years. Great idea to use the new women’s league as a platform for this.

Just reading the description of the piece on the cover of the magazine, you knew the conclusion and slant of the article before reading the thousands of words in it. The teaser was something like “Are we ready to accept our girls getting injured more?” Gee, I wonder what the writer thinks…

Thank you for your comments. The NYT story upset a lot of us. Some of its points are very important, but the story’s headline & frame are really awful. Complain to them! Complain loudly! And ask them to give more space to women’s sports in general, written for women athletes and men & women fans of women’s sports. I mean, I want a story about that women who figured out a program for preventing those injuries – not about people’s fear girls might get hurt! Funny: when a female athlete returns to her sport after giving birth, stories tend to focus on how strong childbirth makes her – as they should – but if she comes back three times from an ACL injury, it makes headlines as a symptom of the weakness of her sex??? It’s a basic sort of feminist thing to say, but if male athletes had this problem with ACL tears, it’d have been taken as a standard risk in the sport, and training programs would have been built around preventing this injury from the start.

Fact is female athletes have been “getting past it” since, well, they started practicing their sport.

I’d be really interested to know if people have posted “not the forum” in response to the very interesting articles on pitch invasion about racism in football culture. Sexism & homophobia are just as big as issues in football culture. They are just as important to understand in our efforts to put an end to them.

Pitchinvasion is, in fact, a real oasis in terms of football websites – most sites rarely cover women’s football and never give space to stories written from the perspective of a woman athlete or fan. Print media is even worse.

The shame of that NYT article is that it’s written as though no women athletes read the NYT. Informed women athletes & fans are rarely, rarely imagined as readers of the sports pages. (Today’s Guardian has not one sentence about any woman in any sport in its pages). This is a real indication of how deeply ingrained sexism is in the media.

Deeply embedded in that NYT article is the name of one women who has worked in collaboration with a doctor in Santa Monica, California on knee injury prevention training, and you will find on my blog click-thoughs to information about their work – click throughs not offered by the NYT website.

Solutions basically come from us politicized & committed feminists (male & female) working in the corners of the culture. So, it ain’t US Soccer. It’s coaches & players, and physiotherapists who really listen to their patients.

I doubt the NYT would publish an article about the same issue written from a feminist perspective – which would recount horror stories about women athletes being offered career ending surgery as “treatment”, and highlight the ways that physiological differences get buried under a male standard, and also by a reluctance to admit that gender differences matter. In my view, that’s the real story.

“And, most problematic of all: we don’t listen to girls. We don’t take their complaints seriously. We dismiss their complaints as teenage melodrama or psychosomatic weakness.”

I don’t think adults listen to boys much either. Look at how many high school football players have died of dehydration or how many little league pitchers throw their arms out before they even reach high school. So many coaches and parents (dads, mostly, I suppose) assume that anything that doesn’t kill the boy makes him stronger…until, you know, it actually does kill him.

Coaches and parents just need to be a lot more sophisticated in general about how kids’ bodies work. Certainly, reading up on the latest research on gender specific issues is an important part of that.

I came across your response while looking for information on how to coach girls in soccer. Just by chance, I had read the NY Times article but took a completely different view. To me it was an interesting medical issue and the frequency of female ACL injuries very concerning. I am glad I now know this information. I went away thinking about what can be done do to minimize these injuries for my daughters and her fellow athletes. There does not seem to be any clarity on how to currently do this which is very unfortunate.

While I appreciate your point of view. I found your response weak and primarily based on exceptions and unsubstantiated beliefs. This is inappropriate- please back up your points with real data. The reference to your sister coaching runners is inappropriate and bar talk. What did you really contribute?

For example:
YOUR PARAPHRASE: The author then goes on the explain how girls develop differently – e.g. boys gain more muscle, but become less flexible; girls get fatter but more flexible. The author’s language flirts dangerously close to naturalizing girls and women as weaker, more delicate etc (I’m not the only one to spot this slant). WHAT WAS STATED IS LIKELY TRUE AND PERHAPS AN IMPORTANT FACT IN THE ETIOLOGY OF THE INJURIES. AND WOMEN MIGHT BECOME INJURIES DUE TO THESE MALE, FEMALE DIFFERENCES-STRENGTH BEING ONE OF THEM.

YOUR LATER RESPONSE: One must recognize gender differences in order to coach/train/treat athletes well. Those differences may be physiological, metabolic, social and psychological. SO THERE ARE DIFFERENCES (do not forget anatomical, genetic and physical). THIS SEEMS LIKE A CONTRADICTION FROM WHAT YOU STATE ABOVE. YOU CANNOT HAVE IT BOTH WAYS.

I encourage you to click through on the links that I provide to the articles about ACL tears & knee injury prevention.

My comment were written on a blog, not a peer reviewed journal – they represent the well informed perspectives of a woman who has, in fact, dedicated her life to feminist thought & criticism. Please see links on my blog if you want to know more about my work. From A Left Wing, though, is something I do for me and for the folks out there interested in a queer-positive feminist marxist slant on things.

There are intersting books written by coaches & training staff, as well as sociologists about women athletes etc.

Both ways? What do you mean? I don’t dispute that gender difference matters. What I dispute is how we frame stories about gender difference. My argument with that story, as I state above, is with the way it is framed – read my responses above if you want to guess what I think about your comments.

And, hey, when you take your team to nationals multiple times, and send your girls to Division I NCAA programs on full rides, well, then you can talk to me about my sister. I’m sorry, but she is actually a very excellent model for how one might think about gender difference and key aspects of coaching to them. Lots of luck to you, and to the young women you coach.

Thanks for the post. Girls and women need a little positive feed back every once in a while. I’ve never understood the need to put women down by some. Maybe some men still feel threatened especially by a real good female athletic.

What’s surprising is that in this country especially (the United States) we’ve enjoyed such enormous success internationally in women’s football (soccer) that you’d expect the awareness of the sport would spur supply of good women’s gear. Especially in suburban areas where girl’s soccer leagues flourish. An obvious imbalance remains and I hope we as a nation have the courage to confront that fact and set things right.

I think some girls are being to hard on themselves. Not wanting to report an injury seems a bit over the top to me. Do they actually want to be men. If not just understand that they aren’t physically built like us.